ATLANTA — Cosmic rays are now blamed for a scary experience midair during a JetBlue flight. The plane suddenly lost altitude while traveling from Cancun to New Jersey in October.
It’s called a bit-flip, and planes are not the only things impacted.
Marie Moe’s heart is run by a pacemaker. So, you can imagine her fear when chest pains struck 30,000 feet up, on a flight from Norway to the Netherlands.
“I looked down and could see the chest muscle twitching,” Moe said.
When the flight landed, an ambulance rushed her to the hospital.
What caused her pacemaker to crash and go to backup mode?
“It was bit-flips in the memory of the device that were caused by cosmic radiation,” Moe said.
Bit flips are caused by the invisible energy beams blasted away from exploding stars or supernovas, deep in space.
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Georgia Tech professor John Cressler told us those energy particles can corrupt a computer’s memory.
“Then it could take a digital one or a zero, which are in communications streams, and flip that in the opposite direction,” Cressler said.
When that happens, the machine will shut down and reset, which is why the Federal Aviation Administration made it mandatory to engineer planes for single-event effects in the 1960s.
After the October JetBlue flight, the FAA and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency issued emergency airworthiness directives for all impacted Airbus models, writing, “This unsafe condition could lead to an uncommanded elevator movement that may result in exceeding the aircraft’s structural capability and consequent loss of continued safe flight and landing.”
Airbus confirms the jet experienced a “corrupted value” in its elevator-control system and said the software fix has now been deployed across its fleet.
Channel 2 Action News reached out to Delta about their fleet, and was told in a statement, “As safety comes before everything else, Delta has fully complied with the directive. Teams completed the required work with no effect on operations.”
Delta also said the directive applied to less than 50 aircraft in its fleet.
Researchers say these types of events will increase as technology continues to get smaller, which is why they are continuing to look for new ways to mitigate the problem.
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